Israel cannot accept a
reality in which the IDF will transform from a people's army to a minority
army, Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee (FADC) chairman MK Shaul Mofaz said
Monday, according to Israel Radio.

Prime Minister
Binyamin Netanyahu said on Wednesday that he would discuss with his coalition
partners the appropriate length of time by which to extend the Tal Law, which
is aimed at increasing ultra-Orthodox enlistment in the IDF, and then bring the
decision for government approval.

On Sunday, Netanyahu
told the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee that the law would be
extended for five years.

Objections raised by ministers Avigdor Lieberman
and Ehud Barak most likely played a central part in Netanyahu's decision. The
prime minister postponed the debate so that he will have time to reexamine the
issue.

Hiddush
President, Rabbi Uri Regev, remarked “We call on Israel Beiteinu and
Independence parties to torpedo thisproposed extension,” saying “The Tal Law,
which was supposed to increase access for ultra-Orthodox men into military and
civil service, has failed, in part because of the opposition of ultra-Orthodox
leadership.

Any
extension beyond one year will reward this failure and encourage further draft
dodging.

The year
extension, as proposed by Defense Minister Ehud Barak, could be a good
opportunity to make real change, stopping the distinguishing between classes of
people and lead us on a path to actually exercising the principle of compulsory
service.”

A large
sector, which is growing at an unprecedented rate, has no duty or obligation
and is completely supported and maintained by the dwindling few who bear the
whole burden and all the obligations.

...Only the gradual recruitment of Haredi men
to the army and their integration into the country's intellectual circles and
productive life can allay the fear among significant parts of the secular
public.

The
Haredi military unit and vocational training courses are to a large extent
fiction, despite their public relations.

The law
that perpetuates discrimination in favor of the ultra-Orthodox community at the
expense of secular people - known as the Tal Law after retired Supreme Court
Justice Zvi Tal - has justified its opponents' fears and proved wrong its
supporters' pretensions.

...Israeli
society, the military and - no less - the ultra-Orthodox community need shaking
up. This must start with the shelving of the Tal Law.

[T]he state must find ways to maintain gentle but
insistent pressure on haredi young men to share with their non-haredi brethren
in the collective endeavor to defend the Jewish state.

Providing economic
incentives to those who do serve, creating additional frameworks within the IDF
and National Service that include the haredi population, and allowing
evolutionary changes within this population to proceed unhindered are the best
methods of facilitating integration.

Some 4,000 high school
seniors have already signed the 'senior's letter' - a petition calling on the
country's leaders not to go ahead with the Tal law's ratification.

"We are
motivated, but if we look at the data, our service, as significant as it may
be, will not be enough at this rate. Our stance is against the law, not against
the haredi sector. We do believe that their different must be taken into
consideration but in a way that means they too will serve in the IDF."

In the mid-1990s, and
mostly after the year 2000, the army started to take in haredim, yet
encountered a serious problem – they are different than the rest of society.

...However, the army, just like society as a
whole, does not really wish to integrate the haredim. The military wishes to
create a melting pot, thereby making the haredim like them. In other words,
this is about secularization.

A small rebellion
broke out in the heart of the national-religious world this week over the issue
of women singing in the army.

Dozens of pre-army
youth from several yeshivot have signed a petition in the past few days vowing
not to enlist in the army until religious soldiers are exempted from army
ceremonies in which women sing.

Rabbi Eliezer Melamed,
a prominent Religious Zionism leader, is calling on young religious men to
delay their enlistment with the IDF until every soldier will be allowed to
excuse himself from military ceremonies which include women performers.

Rabbi Melamed, head of the Har Bracha Yeshiva which
was removed from the hesder arrangement with the army due to his refusal to
condemn soldiers' disobedience, made the remark in an interview with the Galei
Israel radio station.

The next
confrontation is brewing over female instructors for religious soldiers.

A
document issued by the Chief of Staff's adviser on women's affairs, reported by
Haaretz last year, cited several cases in which field-unit soldiers refused to
receive instruction from women, claiming it could lead to forbidden physical
contact.

Dozens of young
ultra-Orthodox men are choosing to join the Israel Police instead of the IDF,
following the army's war on the exclusion of women and the recent dismissal of
the rabbi in charge of integrating haredim into military service.

In the police, the new
recruits are promised better conditions matching their religious beliefs, such
as complete gender segregation and strictly kosher meals.

Three new immigrant
girls from the US say they not only can stay religious and serve in the IDF but
also can become officers, despite the Chief Rabbinate - and almost every other
religious Zionist rabbi - ruling against it, enjoining girls to serve Israel
through the National Service.

Chairman of the Tzohar
national-religious grouping of rabbis, Rabbi David Stav, sent a letter to all
Members of Knesset on Wednesday, accusing Chief Rabbi Yona Metzger of trying to
deceive them regarding Metzger’s opposition to the so-called “Tzohar bill.”

Stav said in his
response on Wednesday that the law “clearly allows marriageregistration with
the rabbinate alone” and that its dignity and status would not be harmed in
anyway.

Knesset State Control Committee chairman Ronnie
Bar-On (Kadima) called on Wednesday for broader implementation by rabbinical
courts of a law that allows dayanim, or rabbinical judges, to impose punitive
sanctions on men who refuse to give their wife a bill of divorce.

“The rabbinical courts
must make greater use of the halachic authority that the law provides them,
including taking steps to impose punitive sanctions on the initiative of the
rabbinical courts themselves,” said Prof. Ruth Halperin Kedari, co-author of
the Rackman report, during the hearing.

Thousands of Israeli couples are forced to
marry overseas or live as common-law spouses because of the ongoing
capitulation by successive Israeli governments to the rule of the rabbinical
establishment.

Given this reality, it's hard to even imagine the state granting
full recognition to the rights of same-sex couples.

The Committee to Appoint of Rabbinical Judges (dayanim)
is, for the first time in more than a decade (since women’s groups started
protesting the issue), is an exclusively male panel.

...Consider how many other issues are burning in Israeli
society — half a million tent protesters this past summer, a country currently
paralyzed by all-out strike, members and former members of government on trial
for bribery — and yet none of these issues have raised the ire of the religious
parties like this, causing them to cry foul this way. As if the only thing that
really scares some men is to actually give women some power.

The
document describes attempts by Shas to get a string of its people appointed to
key offices - including Rabbi Yitzchak Yosef, another of Rabbi Ovadiah's sons,
to the office of chief rabbi of Jerusalem, Rabbi Benjamin Atias, the brother of
Housing Minister Ariel Atias, to lead the Petach Tikvah rabbinate, Yaakov
Chikotai, who is married to Rabbi Ovadia's daughter, as head rabbi of
Modi'in-Maccabim-Reut and others.

The
impact of the scandal will depend to an extent on the state comptroller, who
must decide whether or not to open an investigation into the appointments or
even freeze them.

MK Nitzan Horowitz
(Meretz): “The rabbinate, despite all its problems, is not the private business
of one man, and it is not acceptable that it is managed in a ‘Sicilian’ style
according to the interests of one family or another.”

Interior
Minister Eli Yishai on Wednesday apologized to the families of the Israel
Defense Forces soldiers killed during the Second Lebanon War, a day after he
declared that Israel had failed in the Second Lebanon War because the troops
did not "raise their eyes to God" and pray.

"In the Six Day War, every Jew, and every
Jew that went to battle, raised their eyes to the creator," the Interior
Minister said. But in the Second Lebanon War, Yishai said, the IDF relied only
on its own strength.

"This is a great lesson," Yishai
said. "When all Arab states are against the Jewish people, what will save
the Jewish people is study of the Torah."

Interior Minister Eli Yishai said Wednesday that
the State's senior officials consult Shas spiritual leader Rabbi Ovadia Yosef
and that "everything he has said and they have done – has been a huge
success."

While
fully appreciating the potential efficacy of faith and prayer, it is another
matter altogether to distort the facts to fit your religious purpose, claiming
knowledge of Divine conduct in the outcome of wars without any humility.

Had Yishai
said “Faith and prayer strengthen Israel and its ability to meet external
threats”, very few would have faulted him.

...Either
Yishai believes what he said, in which case, his perception of reality is
suspect, or he does not believe what he said, in which case, he is a
manipulative liar. In either case, he is unfit to serve.

Journalist turned
politician Yair Lapid continued to reveal more of is views on key issues
Monday, telling his followers on Facebook that he opposes giving Israelis
abroad the right to vote.

Lapid also came out
against the Tal Law on haredi (ultra-Orthodox) service in the IDF. He said the
law should be repealed and a civil service authority should be formed.

When asked about
separating religion from state, he said he supported civil marriage and
separating religion from politics, but he did not back a complete separation of
religion from state or the cancellation of the Law of Return.

Nonprofit
associations dedicated to guaranteeing that fertility treatments comply with
Jewish religious law (halakha) are thriving in Israel.

...Is it
that only the ultra-Orthodox deserve double oversight of the combining of eggs
and sperm - oversight by both the fertility center and the kashrut supervisors?

Do
non-Haredim undergoing IVF not deserve the same protections? And what about the
medical training of these kashrut supervisors? Who decides that they have the
skills needed for the job? And why are they given access to confidential
medical information?

The
Chief Rabbinate has frozen a tender it had issued for establishing a service to
help families establish brain death for their loved ones, after transplant
surgeons said they would not tolerate rabbinic involvement.

The
tender under dispute was for setting up an office, with the rabbinate's help,
that would operate 24/7 for families seeking halakhic and medical guidance in
determining brain death, so they could give permission for their loved ones'
organs to be harvested for transplant.

The
proper thing to do is relate the tension between Judaism and democracy as being
pressure between two manifestations of the value of human dignity: dignity for
the universal person, and dignity for the Jewish person who has the right to
political and cultural sovereignty.

Any
tension in this regard should be examined individually to try to resolve it
with a minimum of damage to either of these two values.

Rabbi Tsafi Lev, is a CLAL Rabbis Without Borders Fellow. He is the
Director of Jewish Studies at New Community Jewish High
School in West Hills, CA, and a Lecturer
for the Fingerhut School of Education Master of Arts in Education program at
the American Jewish University.

I suggest that Israel
make a clear separation of Synagogue and State.

...Only without a
government sponsored Rabbinate can freedom of religion really flourish in
Israel.

When that happens we can see Orthodox, Hassidim, Reform,
Reconstructionist, and Conservative Jews, and even right-wing Haredim, support
each other in continual growth and closeness to our shared, One and Only God.

A
religious-Zionist Jewish studies center this week published a photograph of the
members of the Fogel family who were murdered last March in the settlement of
Itamar, but blurred the face of the mother for modesty reasons.

…If you read the apology carefully, it is
clear that they believe the “mistake” was running the picture at all — not
blurring Ruth Fogel’s face. From the apology, it is understood that the
publication, like too many places, is officially a female-free zone.

But for
me, these incidents aren't as insidious or fundamentally troubling as the
battle that is being fought by people like Anat Hoffman, of the Israel
Religious Action Center and founder of Women of the Wall.

Her
crusade -- well-off the radar of American mainstream press -- is to allow women
the right to carry Torah, to pray as equals.

The
Israel Defense Forces has been "stunned" by the findings of a new
study which says an officers' visitation program to Nazi death camps, meant to
reinforce Jewish and national values, has had the opposite effect on up to 20
percent of the soldiers.

The Jewish
Agency's new directions provide concrete answers to some of the Jewish people's
seminal challenges, positively affecting Jewish identity, attachment to Israel
and aliyah, and even a cursory look at the numbers seems to bear this out.

Don’t get me wrong: I share your vision of a
kinder, gentler, rabbinate (since it is unrealistic to fantasize about
separation of church and state). And it would certainly be wonderful if such an
effort came to be.

But I’m not waiting around for American Jewish organizations
or individual U.S. Jewish billionaires to ride in on a white horse.

Using a sample of 509
adults here, the poll asked respondents ‘How important do you believe it is for
Israeli lawmakers to consider the views of Jews in the Diaspora when creating
legislation such as ‘Who is a Jew?’ In response, 77 percent said it was
extremely important and 23% said it was important.

North American students studying in Israel will
grapple with difficult questions about what it means to be Zionist and about
Israel’s purpose for world Jewry at the second annual Avi Schaefer Symposium in
Jerusalem on Sunday.